Sofia D. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Minnesota–
A report released Monday, July 20 by the U.S. Department of State accuses prominent activists, academics, politicians, and media figures of being assets for Cuba in a long-term “civilizational” war against the U.S. The report lays the groundwork for justifying direct war against Cuba, following months of a tightening embargo. In combination with recent comments by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that “it is time to crush this evil [of left-wing activism –Ed.] forever,” and recent measures to revoke visas for foreign-born left-wing activists, the report has sparked renewed speculation that the Trump Administration aims to silence all left-wing activity in the U.S.
The report, entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, mainly summarizes (and sensationalizes) public and long-known relationships between Cuba and left groups in the U.S., Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Many of the covert organizations listed are now defunct, while the more recent examples are legally legitimate, well-known institutions organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, as well as private citizens.
The report mostly focuses on “terrorism” and the “civilizational threat” posed by Cuba. It spends the first half of its text tying Cuban intelligence to the militaristic activity of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. Suddenly, halfway through, it abruptly shifts to discussing the various present-day cultural, educational, and activist partnerships between the Cuban government and leftist groups. While the report spends a great deal of time fear-mongering about “spy networks” in these groups, it is vague about what the supposed threat of these networks, and the Cuban government, actually is.
Many of the examples of a supposed “threat” are, in reality, forms of protected speech and protest defending the right of the Cuban nation to self-determination. Attempting to tie the bombings and police resistance of the New Left to contemporary Cuba solidarity efforts, the report implies that many left groups gaining influence in mainstream politics and mass movements, such as DSA, BLM, the People’s Forum, and the Venceremos Brigade, are likewise “terrorists.” The report goes so far as to name private citizens, such as Amy Goodman, Christian Smalls, Hasan Piker, Isra Hirsi, and Karen Bass. Piker has commented on X (formerly Twitter) that the activities of these citizens are “absolutely protected by the 1st amendment,” and that the Federal Government is “trying to chill speech through intimidation.”
The rest of the examples of a “threat” to the U.S. are softer, ideological ties which encourage the working people of the U.S. to identify their interests with the interests of the Cuban government. From the U.S. government’s perspective, this is certainly not favorable, but does it pose a threat to the American people? Hardly. The combination of accusations of terror and the fear-mongering over “Cuban-style Marxism” results in a bizarre, 100-page long conspiracy theory that places Cuba as the central leader of an international plot to destroy the U.S.
Combined with recent remarks by Trump that imply an intent to intervene in Cuba, the report is being broadly interpreted by forces on the left and the liberal mainstream media as a war cry, given the similarities to previous justifications for war provided by the U.S. government (e.g. “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, “the threat to Judeo-Christian civilization” in Palestine, etc.). We direct the reader’s attention to the language painting Cuba specifically as a civilizational threat, rather than simply as a communist threat:
“What emerged from this milieu was a new theory of revolutionary politics (Note: the document refers to this ‘new theory’ as ‘Third Worldism’). The struggle had expanded from a class war to a much larger civilizational conflict, demanding not just economic equality, but social, cultural, and even spiritual transformation. Its advocates spoke the language of a single planetary struggle – stretching from the battlefield to the classroom – between the West and the Third World. In their telling, the revolutionary agent was no longer the industrial proletariat, but the colonized nations and peoples of the Global South. The principal antagonist of world history was no longer ‘capital,’ but Western civilization itself.
…Castro, Che Guevara, and the other evangelists of Havana declared that the Third World was united by a single struggle for liberation, and that this struggle extended into the imperial metropoles themselves, to the racially oppressed peoples living within the Western powers. The black American in Detroit, in this telling, was not a ‘worker,’ first and foremost; he was a colonized subject, a revolutionary brother of the Vietnamese peasant and the Congolese rebel, a member of a distinctive Third World colony embedded in the heart of the empire.”
To the right, this resonates with the other “civilizational threats” that they have been fear-mongering about throughout the whole process of fascistization since the 2010s: “Critical Race Theory,” immigrant communities as dangerous invaders, and “Radical Islam” (not to mention transgender people merely existing and participating in society). The aim of this report is to activate these associations in the right-wing mind, and garner their unconditional support for war with Cuba. For the “progressive” liberals and moderates, there is a slightly different aim after the recent DSA electoral wins: to paint communism as not just “a foreign agent introduced from without,” but literally incompatible with America.
Ironically, the report’s analysis of the shift from class-based, universal solidarity among oppressed and working peoples to Third Worldism reads, to much of the left, as a bitterly sober analysis. It is, indeed, true that much of what remains of “the Left” from the 1960s and 1970s has adopted Third Worldism, an overemphasis on the universality of guerilla warfare, and more recently, multipolarism as guiding lights, in order to abdicate a true Marxist analysis of the class struggle in all lands and the national liberation struggles of oppressed people, as embodied in a series of tendencies caused by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the ensuing disillusionment with the USSR, an event explicitly referred to in the report.
While these ideologies have historically inspired mass movements, they have also neglected fundamental aspects of revolutionary strategy, such as revolutionary work to win over workers of imperialist nations (in this case, white American workers) and actually leading the masses instead of following whatever trend appears to be popular at the time, or striking the careful balance between pre-revolutionary “legal” work and revolutionary “illegal” work in times of governmental crisis. It is the genuine class struggle of Marxism which poses a fundamental threat to capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. If we are being charitable, we could say that the strength attributed to Third Worldism in the report is a clever bit of misdirection on the part of Secretary Rubio.
Whatever the case may be, framing things in terms of a “foreign conspiracy” obscures the real reasons that pro-Cuban and anti-American sentiment are growing among the U.S. left, and that the left itself is growing. American workers have no reason to believe in the “American dream,” bearing the weight of a shambling, crisis-ridden economy, crippled with debt and sky-high prices on essentials, where jobs are harder and harder to find, even for college graduates, and the ruling capitalist class continues plunging into wars to maintain their profits. These objective factors, which no government has direct control over, but which it must accommodate as the natural consequences of capitalist development, have sparked a renewed, organic interest in the efforts of the Cuban people and state to build a truly socialist society free of these problems.